Modern Painting Part 8

THE CAMERA IN ART.

It is certain that the introduction of j.a.paneseries into this country has permanently increased our sense of colour; is it therefore improbable that the invention of photography has modified, if it has not occasioned any very definite alteration in our general perception of the external world? It would be interesting to inquire into such recondite and illusive phenomena; and I am surprised that no paper on so interesting a question has appeared in any of our art journals.

True, so many papers are printed in our weekly and monthly press that it is impossible for any one to know all that has been written on any one subject; but, so far as I am aware, no such paper has appeared, and the absence of such a paper is, I think, a serious deficiency in our critical literature.

It is, however, no part of my present purpose to attempt to supply this want. I pa.s.s on to consider rapidly a matter less abstruse and of more practical interest, a growing habit among artists to avail themselves of the a.s.sistance of photographs in their work. It will not be questioned that many artists of repute do use photographs to--well, to put it briefly, to save themselves trouble, expense, and, in some cases, to supplant defective education. But the influence of photography on art is so vast a subject, so multiple, so intricate, that I may do no more here than lift the very outer fringe.

It is, however, clear to almost everybody who has thought about art at all, that the ever-changing colour and form of clouds, the complex variety (definite in its very indefiniteness) of every populous street, the evanescent delicacy of line and aerial effect that the most common and prosaic suburb presents in certain lights, are the very enchantment and despair of the artist; and likewise every one who has for any short while reflected seriously on the problem of artistic work must know that the success of every evocative rendering of the exquisite externality of crowded or empty street, of tumult or calm in cloud-land, is the fruit of daily and hourly observation--observation filtered through years of thought, and then fortified again in observation of Nature.

But such observation is the labour of a life; and he who undertakes it must be prepared to see his skin brown and blister in the s.h.i.+ne, and feel his flesh pain him with icy chills in the biting north wind. The great landscape painters suffered for the intolerable desire of Art; they were content to forego the life of drawing-rooms and clubs, and live solitary lives in unceasing communion with Art and Nature. But artists in these days are afraid of catching cold, and impatient of long and protracted students.h.i.+p. Everything must be made easy, comfortable, and expeditious; and so it comes to pa.s.s that many an artist seeks a.s.sistance from the camera. A moment, and it is done: no wet feet; no tiresome sojourn in the country when town is full of merry festivities; and, above all, hardly any failure--that is to say, no failure that the ordinary public can detect, nor, indeed, any failure that the artist's conscience will not get used to in time.

Mr. Gregory is the most celebrated artist who is said to make habitual use of photography. Mr. Gregory has no warmer admirer than myself. His picture of "Dawn" is the most fairly famous picture of our time. But since that picture his art has declined. It has lost all the n.o.ble synthetical life which comes of long observation and gradual a.s.similation of Nature. His picture of a yachtsman in this year's Academy was as paltry, as "realistic" as may be.

Professor Herkomer is another well-known artist who is said to use photography. It is even said that he has his sitter photographed on to the canvas, and the photographic foundation he then covers up with those dreadful browns and ochres which seem to const.i.tute his palette.

Report credits him with this method, which it is possible he believes to be an advance on the laborious process of drawing from Nature, to which, in the absence of the ingenious instrument, the Old Masters were perforce obliged to resort. It will be said that what matter how the artists work--that it is with the result, not the method, with which we are concerned. Dismissing report from our ears, surely we must recognise all the cheap realism of the camera in Professor Herkomer's portraits; and this is certainly their characteristic, although photography may have had nothing to do with their manufacture.

Mr. Bartlett is another artist who, it is said, makes habitual use of photographs; and surely in some of his boys bathing the photographic effects are visible enough. But although very far from possessing the accomplishments of Mr. Gregory, Mr. Bartlett has acquired some education, and can draw, when occasion requires, very well indeed from life.

Mr. Mortimer Menpes is the third artist of any notoriety that rumour has declared to be a disciple of the camera. His case is the most flagrant, for it is said that he rarely, if ever, draws from Nature, and that his entire work is done from photographs. Be this as it may, his friends have stated a hundred times in the Press that he uses photography, and it would seem that his work shows the mechanical aid more and more every day. Some years ago he went to j.a.pan, and brought home a number of pictures which suited drawing-rooms, and were soon sold. I did not see the exhibition, but I saw some pictures done by him at that time--one, an especially good one, I happened upon in the Grosvenor Gallery. This picture, although superficial and betraying when you looked into it a radical want of knowledge, was not lacking in charm. In French studios there is a slang phrase which expresses the meretricious charm of this picture--_c'est du chic_; and the meaning of this very expressive term is ignorance affecting airs of capacity. Now the whole of Mr. Menpes' picture was comprised in this term. The manner of the master who, certain of the shape and value of the shadow under an eye, will let his hand run, was reproduced; but the exact shape and value of the shadows were not to be gathered from the photograph, and the result was a charming but a hollow mockery.

And then the "colour-notes"; with what a.s.surance they were dashed into the little pictures from j.a.pan, and how dexterously the touch of the master who knows exactly what he wants was parodied! At the first glance you were deceived; at the second you saw that it was only such cursive taste and knowledge as a skilful photographer who had been allowed the run of a painter's studio for a few months might display.

Nowhere was there any definite intention; it was something that had been well committed to memory, that had been well remembered, but only half-understood. Everything floated--drawing, values, colours--for there was not sufficient knowledge to hold and determine the place of any one.

Since those days Mr. Menpes has continued to draw from photographs, and--the base of his artistic education being deficient from the first--the result of his long abstention from Nature is apparent, even to the least critical, in the some hundred and seventy paintings, etchings, and what he calls diamond-points on ivory, on exhibition at Messrs. Dowdeswell's. Diamond-points on ivory may astonish the unthinking public, but artists are interested in the drawing, and not what the drawing is done upon. Besides the diamond-points, there is quite sufficient matter in this exhibition to astonish visitors from Peckham, Pentonville, Islington, and perhaps Clapham, but not Bayswater--no, not Bayswater. There are frames in every sort of pattern--some are even adorned with gold ta.s.sels--and the walls have been especially prepared to receive them.

These pictures and etchings purport to be representations of India, Burma, and Cashmire. The diamond-points, I believe, purport to be diamond-points. In some of the etchings there is the same ingenious touch of hand, but anything more woful than the oil pictures cannot easily be imagined. In truth, they do not call for any serious criticism; and were it not for the fact that they afforded an opportunity of making some remarks--which seemed to me to be worth making--about the influence of photography in modern art, I should have left the public to find for itself the value of this attempt, in the grandiloquent words of the catalogue, "to bring before my countrymen the aesthetic and artistic capabilities, and the beauty in various forms, that are to be found in our great Indian Empire." To criticise the pictures in detail is impossible; but I will try to give an impression of the exhibition as a whole. Imagine a room hung with ordinary school slates, imagine that all these slates have been gilt, and that some have been adorned with gold ta.s.sels instead of the usual sponge, and into each let there be introduced a dome, a camel, a palm-tree, or any other conventional sign of the East.

On examining the paintings thus sumptuously encased you will notice that the painter has not been able to affect with the brush any slight air of capacity; the material betrays him at every point The etchings are _du chic_; but the paintings are merely abortive. The handling consists in scrubbing the colour into the canvas, attaining in this manner a texture which sometimes reminds you of wool, sometimes of sand, sometimes of both. The poor little bits of blue sky stick to the houses; there is nowhere a breath of air, a ray of light, not even a conventionally graduated sky or distance; there is not an angle, or a pillar, or a stairway finely observed; there is not even any such eagerness in the delineation of an object as would show that the painter felt interest in his work; every sketch tells the tale of a burden taken up and thankfully relinquished. Here we have white wall, but it has neither depth nor consistency; behind it a bit of sandy sky; the ground is yellow, and there is a violet shadow upon it. But the colour of the ground does not show through the shadow. Look, for example, at No. 36. Is it possible to believe that that red-brick sky was painted from Nature, or that unhappy palm in a picture close by was copied as it raised its head over that wall? The real scene would have stirred an emotion in the heart of the dullest member of the Stock Exchange, and, however unskilful the brushwork, if the man could hold a brush at all, there would have been something to show that the man had been in the presence of Nature. There is no art so indiscreet as painting, and the story of the painter's mind may be read in every picture.

But another word regarding these pictures would be waste of s.p.a.ce and time. Let Mr. Menpes put away his camera, let him go out into the streets or the fields, and there let him lose himself in the vastness and beauty of Nature. Let him study humbly the hang of a branch or the surface of a wall, striving to give to each their character. Let him try to render the mystery of a perspective in the blue evening or its harshness and violence in the early dawn. There is no need to go to Burma, there is mystery and poetry wherever there is atmosphere. In certain moments a backyard, with its pump and a child leaning to drink, will furnish sufficient motive for an exquisite picture; the atmosphere of the evening hour will endow it with melancholy and tenderness. But the insinuating poetry of chiaroscuro the camera is powerless to reproduce, and it cannot be imagined; Nature is parsimonious of this her greatest gift, surrendering it slowly, and only to those who love her best, and whose hearts are pure of mercenary thought.

THE NEW ENGLISH ART CLUB.

This, the ninth season of the New English Art Club, has been marked by a decisive step. The club has rejected two portraits of Mr. Shannon.

So that the public may understand and appreciate the importance of this step, I will sketch, _a coups de crayon peu fondus_, the portrait of a lady as I imagine Mr. Shannon might have painted her. A woman of thirty, an oval face, and a long white brow; pale brown hair, tastefully arranged with flowers and a small plume. The eyes large and tender, expressive of a soul that yearns and has been misunderstood.

The nose straight, the nostrils well-defined, slightly dilated; the mouth curled, and very red. The shoulders large, white, and over-modelled, with cream tints; the arms soft and rounded; diamond bracelets on the wrists; diamonds on the emotional neck. Her dress is of the finest d.u.c.h.esse satin, and it falls in heavy folds. She holds a bouquet in her hands; a pale green garden is behind her; swans are moving gracefully through shadowy water, whereon the moon s.h.i.+nes peacefully. Add to this conception the marvellous square brushwork of the French studio, and you have the man born to paint English d.u.c.h.esses--to paint them as they see themselves, as they would be seen by posterity; and through Mr. Shannon our d.u.c.h.esses realise all their aspirations, present and posthumous. The popularity of these pictures is undoubted; wherever they hang, and they hang everywhere, except in the New English Art Club, couples linger. "How charming, how beautifully dressed, how refined she looks!" and the wife who has not married a man _a la hauteur de ses sentiments_ casts on him a withering glance, which says, "Why can't you afford to let me be painted by Mr. Shannon?"

We are here to realise our ideals, and far is it from my desire to thwart any lady in her aspirations, be they in white or violet satin, with or without green gardens. If I were on the hanging committee of the Royal Academy, all the d.u.c.h.esses in the kingdom should be realised, and then--I would create more d.u.c.h.esses, and they, too, should be realised by Messrs. Shannon, Hacker, and Solomon _les chefs de rayon de la peinture_. And when these painters arrived, each with a van filled with new satin d.u.c.h.esses, I would say, "Go to Mr. Agnew, ask him what s.p.a.ce he requires, and anything over and above they shall have it." I would convert the Chantrey Fund into white satin d.u.c.h.esses, and build a museum opposite Mr. Tate's for the blue. I would do anything for these painters and their d.u.c.h.esses except hang them in the New English Art Club.

For it is entirely necessary that the public should never be left for a moment in doubt as to the intention of this club. It is open to those who paint for the joy of painting; and it is entirely disa.s.sociated from all commercialism. Muslin ballet-girl or satin d.u.c.h.ess it matters no jot, nothing counts with the jury but _l'idee plastique_: comrades.h.i.+p, money gain or loss, are waived. The rejection of Mr. Shannon's portraits will probably cost the club four guineas a year, the amount of his subscription, and it will certainly lose to the club the visits of his numerous drawing-room following. This is to be regretted--in a way. The club must pay its expenses, but it were better that the club should cease than that its guiding principle should be infringed.

Either we may or we may not have a gallery from which popular painting is excluded. I think that we should; but I know that Academicians and dealers are in favour of enforced prost.i.tution in art. That men should practise painting for the mere love of paint is wholly repugnant to every healthy-minded Philistine. The critic of the Daily Telegraph described the pictures in the present exhibition as things that no one would wish to possess; he then pointed out that a great many were excellently well painted. Quite so. I have always maintained that there is nothing that the average Englishman--the reader of the _Daily Telegraph_--dislikes so much as good painting. He regards it in the light of an offence, and what makes it peculiarly irritating in his eyes is the difficulty of declaring it to be an immoral action; he instinctively feels that it is immoral, but somehow the crime seems to elude definition.

The Independent Theatre was another humble endeavour which sorely tried the conscience of the average Englishman. That any one should wish to write plays that were not intended to please the public--that did not pay--was an unheard-of desire, morbid and unwholesome as could well be, and meriting the severest rebuke. But the Independent Theatre has somehow managed to struggle into a third year of life, and the New English Art Club has opened its ninth exhibition; so I suppose that the _Daily Telegraph_ will have to make up its mind, sorrowfully, of course, and with regret, that there are folk still in London who are not always ready to sell their talents to the highest bidder.

For painters and those who like painting, the exhibitions at the New English Art Club are the most interesting in London. We find there no anecdotes, sentimental, religious, or historical, nor the conventional measuring and modelling which the Academy delights to honour in the name of Art. At the New English Art Club, from the first picture to the last, we find artistic effort; very often the effort is feeble, but nowhere, try as persistently as you please, will you find the loud stupidity of ordinary exhibitions of contemporary painting. This is a plain statement of a plain truth--plain to artists and those few who possess the slightest knowledge of the art of painting, or even any faint love of it. But to the uncultivated, to the ignorant, and to the stupid the New English Art Club is the very place where all the absurd and abortive attempts done in painting in the course of the year are exposed on view. If I wished to test a man's taste and knowledge in the art of painting I would take him to the English Art Club and listen for one or two minutes to what he had got to say.

Immediately on entering the room, before we see the pictures, we know that they are good. For a pleasant soft colour, delicate and insinuating as an odour of flowers, pervades the room. So we are glad to loiter in this vague sensation of delicate colour, and we talk to our friends, avoiding the pictures, until gradually a pale-faced woman with arched eyebrows draws our eyes and fixes our thoughts. It is a portrait by Mr. Sargent, one of the best he has painted. By the side of a fine Hals it might look small and thin, but nothing short of a fine Hals would affect its real beauty. My admiration for Mr. Sargent has often hesitated, but this picture completely wins me. It has all the qualities of Mr. Sargent's best work; and it has something more: it is painted with that measure of calculation and reserve which is present in all work of the first order of merit. I find the picture described with sufficient succinctness in my notes: "A half-length portrait of a woman, in a dress of shot-silk--a sort of red violet, the colour known as puce. The face is pale, the chin is prominent and pointed. There were some j.a.panese characteristics in the model, and these have been selected. The eyes are long, and their look is aslant; the eyebrows are high and marked; the dark hair grows round the pale forehead with wig-like abruptness, and the painter has attempted no attenuation. The carnations are wanting in depth of colour--they are somewhat chalky; but what I admire so much is the exquisite selection, besides the points mentioned--the shadowed outline, so full of the form of her face, and the markings about the eyes, so like her; and the rendering is full of the beauty of incomparable skill. The neck, how well placed beneath the pointed chin! How exact in width, in length, and how it corresponds with the ear; and the jawbone is under the skin; and the anatomies are all explicit--the collar-bone, the hollow of the arm-pit, and the muscle of the arm, the placing of the bosom, its shape, its size, its weight. Mr. Sargent's drawing speaks without hesitation, a beautiful, decisive eloquence, the meaning never in excess of the expression, nor is the expression ever redundant."

I said that we find in this portrait reserve not frequently to be met with in Mr. Sargent's work. What I first noticed in the picture was the admirable treatment of the hands. They are upon her hips, the palms turned out, and so reduced is the tone that they are hardly distinguishable from the dress. As the model sat the light must have often fallen on her hands, and five years ago Mr. Sargent might have painted them in the light. But the portrait tells us that he has learnt the last and most difficult lesson--how to omit. Any touch of light on those hands would rupture the totality and jeopardise the colour-harmony, rare without suspicion of exaggeration or affectation.

In the background a beautiful chocolate balances and enforces the various shades of the shot-silk, and with severity that is fortunate.

By aid of two red poppies, worn in the bodice, a final note in the chord is reached--a resonant and closing consonance; a beautiful work, certainly: I should call it a perfect work were it not that the drawing is a little too obvious: in places we can detect the manner; it does not _coule de source_ like the drawing of the very great masters.

Except Mr. Sargent, no one in the New English Art Club comes forward with a clearly formulated style; everything is more or less tentative, and I cannot entirely exempt from this criticism either Mr. Steer, Mr.

Clausen, or Mr. Walter Sickert. But this criticism must not be understood as a reproach--surely this green field growing is more pleasing than the Academy's barren stubble. I claim no more for the New English Art Club than that it is the growing field. Say that the crop looks thin, and that the yield will prove below the average, but do not deny that what harvest there may be the New English Art Club will bring home. So let us walk round this May field of the young generation and look into its future, though we know that the summer months will disprove for better or for worse.

Mr. Bernard Sickert, the youngest member of this club, a mere beginner, a five- or six-year-old painter, has made, from exhibition to exhibition, constant and consistent progress, and this year he comes forward with two landscapes, both seemingly conclusive of a true originality of vision, and there is a certain ease of accomplishment in his work which tempts me to believe that a future is in store for him. The differences of style in these two pictures do not affect my opinion, for, on looking into the pictures, the differences are more apparent than real--the palette has been composed differently, but neither picture tells of any desire of a new outlook, or even to radically change his mode of expression. The eye which observed and remembered so sympathetically "A Spring Evening", over which a red moon rose like an apparition, observed also the masts and the prows, and the blue sea gay with the life of pa.s.sing sail and flag, and the green embaying land overlooking "A Regatta".

I hardly know which picture I prefer. I saw first "A Regatta", and was struck by the beautiful drawing and painting of the line of boats, their noses thrust right up into the fore water of the picture, a little squadron advancing. So well are these boats drawn that the unusual perspective (the picture was probably painted from a window) does not interrupt for a second our enjoyment. A jetty on the right stretches into the blue sea water, intense with signs of life, and the little white sails glint in the blue bay, and behind the high green hill the colours of a faintly-tinted evening fade slowly. The picture is strangely complete, and it would be difficult to divine any reason for disliking it, even amongst the most ignorant. "A Spring Evening"

is neither so striking nor so immediately attractive; its charm is none the less real. An insinuating and gentle picture, whose delicacy and simplicity I like.

The painter has caught that pa.s.sing and pathetic shudder of coming life which takes the end of a March day before the bud swells or a nest appears. The faint chill twilight floats upon the field, and the red moon mounts above the scrub-clad hillside into a rich grey sky, beautifully graduated and full of the glamour of waning and strengthening light. The slope of the field, too--it is there the sheep are folded--is in admirable perspective. On the left, beyond the hurdles, is a strip of green, perhaps a little out of tone, though I know such colour persists even in very receding lights; and high up on the right the blue night is beginning to show. The sheep are folded in a turnip field, and the root-crop is being eaten down.

The month is surely March, for the lambs are still long-legged--there one has dropped on its knees and is digging at the udder of the pa.s.sive ewe with that ferocious little gluttony which we know so well; another lamb relieves its ear's first itching with its hind hoof--you know the grotesque movement--and the field is full of the weird roaming of animal life, the pathos of the unconscious, the pity of transitory light. A little umber and sienna, a rich grey, not a bit of drawing anywhere, and still the wandering forms of sheep and lambs fully expressed, one sheep even in its particular physiognomy. Truly a charming picture, spontaneous and simple, and proving a painter possessed of a natural sentiment, of values, and willing to employ that now most neglected method of pictorial expression, chiaroscuro.

Neglected by Mr. Steer, who seems prepared to dispense with what is known as _une atmosphere de tableau_. Any one of his three pictures will serve as an example. His portrait of a girl in blue I cannot praise, not because I do not admire it, but because Mr. MacColl, the art critic of the _Spectator_, our ablest art critic, himself a painter and a painter of talent, has declared it to be superior to a Romney. I will quote his words: "The word masterpiece is not to be lightly used, but when we stand before this picture it is difficult to think of any collection in which it would look amiss, or fail to hold its own. If we talk of English masters, Romney is the name that most naturally suggests itself, because in the bright clear face and brown hair and large simplicity of presentment, there is a good deal to recall that painter. But Romney's colour would look cheap beside this, and his drawing conventional in observation, however big in style."

To go one better than this, I should have to say the picture was as good as Velasquez, and to simply endorse Mr. MacColl's words would be a second-hand sort of criticism to which I am not accustomed. Besides, to do so would be to express nothing of my own personal sensations in regard to this picture. So I will say at once that I do not understand the introduction of Romney's name into the argument. If comparison there must be, surely Mr. Watts would furnish one more appropriate.

Both in the seeing and in the execution the portrait seems nearer to Mr. Watts than to Romney. Of Romney's gaiety there is no trace in Mr.

Steer's picture.

The girl sits in a light wooden arm-chair--her arm stretched in front of her, the hands held between her knees--looking out of the picture somewhat stolidly. The Lady Hamilton mood was an exaggerated mood, but there is something of it in every portrait at all characteristic of our great eighteenth-century artist. The portrait exhibited in this year's show of Old Masters in the Academy will do--the lady who walks forward, her hands held in front of her bosom, the fingers pressed together, the white dress floating from the hips, the white brought down with a yellow glaze. I do not think that we find either that gaiety or those glazes in Mr. Steer. From many a Romney the cleaner has removed an outer skin, but I am not speaking of those pictures.

But if I see very little Romney in Steer's picture, I am thankful that I see at least very rare distinction in the figuration of a beautiful and decorative ideal--a girl in blue sitting with her back to an open window, full of the blue night, and on the other side the grey blind, yellowing slightly under the glare of the lamp. I appreciate the very remarkable and beautiful compromise between portrait-painting and decoration. I see rare distinction (we must not be afraid of the word distinction in speaking of Mr. Steer) in his choice of what to draw.

The colour scheme is well maintained, somewhat in the manner of Mr.

Watts, but neither the blue of the dress nor the blue of the night is intrinsically beautiful, and we have only to think of the blues that Whistler or Manet would have found to understand how deficient they are.

The drawing of the face is neither a synthesis, nor is it intimately characteristic of the model: it is simply rudimentary. A round girlish face with a curled mouth and an ugly shadow which does not express the nose. The shoulders are there, that we are told, but the anatomies are wanting, and the body is without its natural thickness. Nor is the drawing more explicit in its exterior lines than it is in its inner.

There is hardly an arm in that sleeve; the elbow would be difficult to find, and the construction of the waist and hips is uncertain; the drawing does not speak like Mr. Sargent's. Look across the room at his portrait of a lady in white satin and you will see there a shadow, so exact, so precise, so well understood, that the width of the body is placed beyond doubt.

But the most radical fault in the portrait I have yet to point out; it is lacking in atmosphere. There is none between us and the girl, hardly any between the girl's head and the wall. The lamp-light effect is conveyed by what Mr. MacColl would perhaps call a symbol, by the shadow of the girl's head. We look in vain for transparent darknesses, lights surrounded by shadows, transposition of tones, and the aspect of things; the girl sits in a full diffused light, and were it not for the shadow on the wall and the shadow cast by the nose, she might be sitting in a conservatory. Speaking of another picture by Mr. Steer, "Boulogne Sands", Mr. MacColl says: "The children playing, the holiday encampment of the bathers' tents, the glint of people flaunting themselves like flags, the dazzle of sand and sea, and over and through it all the chattering lights of noon." I seize upon the phrase, "The people flaunting themselves like flags." The simile is a pretty one, and what suggested it to the writer is the detached colour in the picture; and the colours are detached because there is no atmosphere to bind them together; there are no attenuations, transpositions of tone--in a word, none of those combinations of light and shade which make _une atmosphere de tableau_.

And Mr. Steer's picture is merely an instance of a general tendency which for the last twenty years has widened the gulf between modern and ancient painting. It was Manet who first suggested _la peinture claire_, and his suggestion has been developed by Roll, Monet, and others, until oil-painting has become little more than a sheet of white paper slightly tinted. Values have been diverted from their original mission, which was to build up _une atmosphere de tableau_, and now every value and colour finely observed seem to have for mission the abolition of chiaroscuro. Without atmosphere painting becomes a mosaic, and Mr. MacColl seems prepared to defend this return to archaic formulas. This is what he says: "The sky of the sea-beach, for example, if it be taken as representing form and texture, is ridiculous; it is like something rough and chippy, and if the suggestion gets too much in the way the method has overshot its mark.

Its mark is to express by a symbol the vivid life in the sky-colour, the sea-colour, and the sand-colour, and it is doubtful if the richness and subtlety of those colours can be conveyed in any other way." Here I fail altogether to understand. If the sky's beauty can be expressed by a symbol, why cannot the beauty of men and women be expressed in the same way? How the infinities of aerial perspective can be expressed by a symbol, I have no slightest notion; nor do I think that Mr. MacColl has. In striving to excuse deficiencies in a painter whose very real and loyal talent we both admire, he has allowed his pen to run into dangerous sophistries. "The matter of handling," he continues, "is then a moot point--a question of temperament." Is this so?

That some men are born with a special apt.i.tude for handling colour as other men are born with a special sense of proportions is undeniable; but Mr. MacColl's thought goes further than this barren plat.i.tude, and if he means, as I think he does, that the faculty of handling is more instinctive than that of drawing, I should like to point out to him that handling did not become a merely personal caprice until the present century. A collection of ancient pictures does not present such endless experimentation with the material as a collection of modern pictures. Rubens, Hals, Velasquez, and Gainsborough do not contradict each other so violently regarding their use of the material as do Watts, Leighton, Millais, and Orchardson.

In the nineteenth century no one has made such beautiful use of the material as Manet and Whistler, and we find these two painters using it respectively exactly like Hals and Velasquez. It would therefore seem that those who excel in the use of paint are agreed as to the handling of it, just as all good dancers are agreed as to the step.

But, though all good dancers dance the same step, each brings into his practice of it an individuality of movement and sense of rhythm sufficient to prevent it from becoming mechanical. The ancient painters relied on differences of feeling and seeing for originality rather than on eccentric handling of colour; and all these extraordinary executions which we meet in every exhibition of modern pictures are in truth no more than frantic efforts either to escape from the thraldom of a bad primary education, or attempts to disguise ignorance in fantastic formulas. That which cannot be referred back to the cla.s.sics is not right, and I at least know not where to look among the acknowledged masters for justification for Mr. Steer's jagged brushwork.

Mr. Walter Sickert, whose temperament is more irresponsible, is nevertheless content within the traditions of oil-painting. He exhibits two portraits, both very clever and neither satisfactory, for neither are carried beyond the salient lines of character. Nature has gifted Mr. Sickert with a keen hatred of the commonplace; his vision of life is at once complex and fragmentary, his command on drawing slow and uncertain, his rendering therefore as spasmodic as a poem by Browning. He picks up the connecting links with difficulty, and even his most complete work is full of omissions. The defect--for it is a defect--is by no means so fatal in the art-value of a painting as the futile explanations so dearly beloved by the ignorant. Manet was to the end the victim of man's natural dislike of ellipses, and Mr.

Walter Sickert is suffering the same fate. Still, even the most remote intelligence should be able to gather something of the merit of the portrait of Miss Minnie Cunningham. How well she is in that long red frock--a vermilion silhouette on a rich brown background! I should be still more pleased if the vermilion had been slightly broken with yellow ochre; but then, at heart, I am no more than _un vieux cla.s.sique_. The edges of the vermilion hat are lightened where it receives the glare of the foot-lights; and the face does not suffer from the red. It is as light, as pretty, as suggestive as may be. The thinness of the hand and wrist is well insisted upon, and the trip of the legs, just before she turns, realises, and in a manner I have not seen elsewhere, the enigma of the artificial life of the stage.